Carolyn Monastra: Mystery in the Natural World

Carolyn Monastra: Mystery in the Natural World
Sep 1, 2026 – Oct 15, 2026

United States United States — Art Gallery
433 Warren Street
Hudson, NY 12534

Susan Eley Fine Art presents Carolyn Monastra: Mystery in the Natural World, featured as the gallery's "Artist Focus" from 1 September through 15 October 2026. The exhibition highlights Monastra's alluring landscape photographs, drawn from a practice that has focused for two decades on creating and discovering mystery in the natural world. She uses photography, video, sound, public art, and community-engagement to address environmental issues and examine humans' relationship with our ecosystems.

Raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Monastra received a BA in English Literature from Fordham University and an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art. After a residency at the Skaftfell Visual Arts Center in Iceland in 2009, she was motivated to begin her project The Witness Tree, to honor and preserve places and people affected by climate change. Monastra visited and photographed on every continent while researching and documenting the climate crisis, producing a global documentary project that earned an honorable mention in the Zeke Award for Systematic Change.

Her current project, Divergence of Birds, also focuses on climate concerns but with an emphasis on the threat of species extinction. The work takes inspiration from the Audubon Society's "Birds and Climate Change Report," which projects that by 2080, climate change will affect the habitat range of over half of North American birds—389 species according to a 2019 update. Monastra photographs paper cutouts of these climate-threatened birds in their current natural habitats, a conceptual approach that alludes to a future in which the real birds may be forced out of those homes.

In the series lovely, dark and deep, featured in this exhibition, Monastra aims to depict woods and forests in a mythical manner, capturing their beauty and secrets. These fragmented, long twilight exposures capture a mystifying but also strangely enticing version of the woods, turning to what she calls "the fragmentary space of dreams and my experiences with the environment to discover and create mystery in the natural world."

Monastra's work has been widely exhibited around the world and is in the Marguiles Collection in Miami. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches photography full-time at Nassau Community College, where she has been on faculty since 2005. Her work combines documentary approaches with constructed imagery, employing what she describes as a "gaze within the gaze upon nature" as actual birds recede into marginal zones of survival.

Image: Carolyn Monastra, lovely, dark and deep #12 (2007), Digital Chromogenic Print, 16 x 20 inches © Carolyn Monastra


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